30 years future laboratory ZKM

Dear Visitors,

The ZKM | Center for Art and Media was founded in 1989 with a visionary idea: The future of the arts and media was to be experimentally researched and exhibited under one roof. For 30 years, the ZKM has been showing what new paths art and society can take when they aesthetically test and critically discuss new media and materials. Looking to the future, the ZKM has made history through artistic productions, exhibitions, events, publications and its collection.

We are taking our 30th anniversary next year as an opportunity to present the extraordinary collection of artworks to you in all its diversity for the first time. The ZKM's collection of contemporary art, built up over the past 30 years, is one of the most extensive video art collections in Europe and the largest collection of computer-based art in the world. From February 23, 2019 the exhibition »Writing the History of the Future« will tell an innovative story of 20th and 21st century art – an era of fundamental technological change and an unprecedented democratisation of the experience of art and culture. We would like to invite you to join us in writing the history of the future.

Our educational experiment »Open Codes« is testing new forms of democracy until January 6, 2019. But even after January 6, 2019 the ZKM will remain a place for citizen education. Because only with the instruments of thought can we regain access to reality.

Yours
Peter Weibel